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All Rise...

Judge Amanda DeWees applauds the wisdom of traveling to Acapulco to adopt a baby, because you can work on your tan while waiting for the paperwork to go through.

The Charge

Hope springs maternal.

Opening Statement

There are certain things I've come to expect from a John Sayles movie. A
perceptive, well-written script; a strong ensemble cast, working at their best;
a contemplative, leisurely paced, character-driven story; a strong sense of
place and local atmosphere; and an awareness that the complexities of life can't
be reduced to a tidy ending. In these respects, Casa de los Babys is, I
am happy to say, characteristic of this writer-director's work. Yet his refusal
to offer resolution—his decision to simply observe lives in progress whose
stories are, in his words, "not necessarily resolved"—left me
dissatisfied in a way that other Sayles films have not. Perhaps this is because
so much is at stake here. Is one's destiny really determined by chance, as
Sayles suggests?

Facts of the Case

In an unnamed Latin American town, six American women are waiting to find out
if they will become mothers. They are the latest residents of the hotel the
locals call the "Casa de los Babys," where foreign women hoping to
adopt local babies bide their time while the legal wheels grind. The hotel's
owner, Señora Muñoz (the legendary Rita Moreno), presides efficiently
over employees like Asunción (Vanessa Martinez) while struggling with her
intractable thirty-something son. Out in the surrounding town, unemployed father
Diomedes (Bruno Bichir) struggles to escape his life of poverty by finding a job
or escaping to America, and homeless waif Tito (Juan Ignacio de Anda) struggles
simply to scrape by. As the American women wait for Señora Muñoz's
lawyer brother (Pedro Armendariz Jr.) to give them the good news they all yearn
for, they confront their own hopes and motivations for motherhood and begin to
assess each other's fitness to adopt a child.

The Evidence

As with most of Sayles's work, the plot of the film is primarily a pretext on
which to bring together a range of intriguing characters so that we can watch
them bounce off each other and reveal themselves. Also characteristic of
Sayles's films is the way the setting of the story becomes one of the main
characters in that story. Here, the Latin American setting takes center stage,
and the unhurried opening sequence of the film establishes that the story is not
primarily about the Anglo "name" actresses but about an intersection
of needs in a place that is full of need. Our introduction to this unnamed town
(actually Acapulco, Mexico) establishes its poverty, as a teenaged girl raising
her younger siblings alone takes a dilapidated bus from her makeshift mountain
home to her job cleaning guest rooms at the Casa de los Babys. Still young and
pretty, Asunción (Vanessa Martinez) nonetheless looks careworn, never
glancing out the bus windows at the breathtaking scenery that comes into view.
Beauty doesn't fill an empty stomach. Nor can it sustain the street children we
see, also on their way to "work" for the day—washing the
windshields of cars stopped at traffic lights.

The dusty, dreary streets give way to a vision of gemlike color: fresh
fruit, glowing orange and pale yellow, being carefully sliced and arranged on
plates for the American women of the Casa de los Babys. The two worlds are
bridged by the arrival at the hotel of Señora Muñoz, brisk and
composed, seemingly mistress of all she surveys. The Señora, we will learn,
is not replete with maternal feelings of her own, having been saddled with the
exasperating burden of giving her political activist (read: slacker) son a job
to keep him out of jail. Toward the women who come to her country to adopt
babies she shows neither sentimentality nor condemnation. Doing business with
these women is simply the way she has been able to support herself and her son
since her husband went into political exile (and supplied himself a younger
woman). An efficient businesswoman, she calmly dismisses Diomedes when he
appeals to her for work.

The American women arrive for breakfast, and for the first time we hear
English spoken. After more than ten minutes of Spanish dialogue, it's actually
jarring, an indication of how much out of place they are. It will take time for
us to get to know these women, but even this first meal hints at their widely
disparate characters and concerns: Leslie (Lili Taylor) addresses the waiter in
fluent-sounding Spanish, without making an issue out of it; Gayle (Mary
Steenburgen) is awkward and self-conscious about her Spanish, but knows the
waiter by name; Nan (Marcia Gay Harden) fixes the waiter with a steely gaze and
lectures him, in English, about the proper cooking of her eggs; Jennifer (Maggie
Gyllenhaal) seems to be too preoccupied even to focus on breakfast. Two women
are absent, for quite different reasons.

Sayles is always skilled not only at casting fine actors but also at evoking
fine performances from them. Here many of the better-known actresses turn in
performances that contrast intriguingly with their previous work. Mary
Steenburgen, so tightly wound and brittle in Sayles's previous film, Sunshine
State, is here the gentle peacemaker. Susan Lynch, who was the mysterious
seal-woman with haunted eyes in The Secret of
Roan Inish and the bold lesbian prostitute in From Hell, is all compassion and wonder
as she contemplates the new life she hopes lies ahead of her as a mother. The
scene in which she reveals her dream of motherhood to the uncomprehending
Asunción is the most touching and heartfelt of the film—although
equal credit is due to Vanessa Martinez, a quietly moving presence in the film.
Her hesitant confidences provide an unconscious counterpoint to the other
woman's, so that the two are able to connect with one another even though their
actual words are lost in the language barrier. Sayles crafts moments of
self-revelation like this so delicately that the actresses seem to be
improvising rather than working from a script, and this is true of the entire
film. Every bit of dialogue feels natural, unforced; we really do feel as if
Sayles is granting us the privilege of being unseen onlookers in these people's
lives.

Marcia Gay Harden, as the instantly recognizable Ugly American in the group,
at first seems like the only clichéd character: Loud, abrasive, prejudiced,
and full of a sense of entitlement, she bulldozes over the other women and
alternately threatens and tries to bribe her lawyer. This is a Harden I haven't
seen before, even to the extent of a physical transformation: Where the other
actresses tend to be thin, sometimes to the point of fragility, Harden has
bulked up, so that her visual presence on screen emphasizes her overbearing,
pugnacious persona. Yet Sayles endows her character with shades of complexity,
so that she never becomes a caricature. Lili Taylor, always an intelligent and
interesting actress, brings an astringent humor and down-to-earth quality to the
group. But perhaps the greatest surprise to me was Daryl Hannah, as the driven,
private Skipper. Up until 2003, I had thought that, as an actress, Hannah was a
perfectly good model. But between her performances in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and now Casa de los
Babys, I have revised my opinion entirely. Here she gives a nuanced
performance of a character whose depths go unnoticed by many of the women, who
are intimidated by her beauty and athleticism and don't look beyond these
qualities to see her secret grief.

The large ensemble of characters features excellent work by Hispanic actors
with whom I'm largely unfamiliar, although I was delighted to see the wonderful
Rita Moreno return to the big screen. In her seventies now, she is still a
strong, energetic presence on screen, and brings conviction to her role as a
woman who seems to be in perfect control of everything except her family. As the
sad-eyed Diomedes, Bruno Bichar gives a moving face—and eloquent
tongue—to the plight of well-educated, able-bodied Mexicans forced into
unemployment. With the child actors playing the street urchins, Sayles proves
again (as he did with The Secret of Roan Inish) how deft is his touch
with children. These first-time actors give completely natural and unforced
performances.

Sayles has noted that among his motivations for making Casa de los
Babys was the dearth of films featuring ensembles of women, and one of the
pleasures of the film is indeed seeing the dynamic of this group of disparate
women, brought together by a single common interest. Watching these characters
together, we get an unusually perceptive portrait of the way women really
interact. Indeed, I was disappointed that we never see Señora Muñoz
interacting with any of the American women. I'm sure this omission is
deliberate, and it underscores the gap in experience and understanding between
the Señora and the foreigners, but the separation of the two worlds is so
total that I feel a kind of nostalgia for what might have been—such as the
Señora unwinding over a piña colada and giving practical advice to the
would-be mothers from the font of her own somewhat bitter experience. Such a
loss is just one more casualty of the cultural divide Sayles depicts. From our
bird's-eye perspective, we can see how the characters are connected despite
these divides, and a mystical montage of lottery footage and astrological
readings connects them further as pawns of destiny. But this is an awareness
denied to most, if not all, of the characters themselves, and it is a
perspective that creates a strangely bleak conclusion to the film.

The disc features a very respectable selection of extras, including a
25-minute "Making of" featurette in which the main actresses discuss
their characters; this is a nice counterpart to the director commentary, which
focuses more on the mechanics of filmmaking, offering only tantalizing glimpses
of his thoughts on the characters and the way he envisions chance and destiny
shaping their lives. Sayles does discuss in detail the music for the film, which
was chosen and composed with characteristic care and skill by Sayles himself and
frequent collaborator Mason Daring. I always appreciate Sayles's commentaries,
but this one is concerned more with the nuts and bolts of making the film and
less with what I think of as its heart. The documentary "Beyond
Borders" provides fairly standard behind-the-scenes material and repeats
footage used in the two other featurettes; it also gives away key character
revelations, so don't watch this before seeing the film. An "On
Location" documentary feature, the film's theatrical trailer, some
pointlessly tiny images of related DVD releases, and a brief advertising spot
for the soundtrack round the extras out.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Unfortunately, the documentary "On Location with John Sayles" is
heavy-handed in contrast to the light touch demonstrated in the film. For 25
minutes it hammers home the message that Americans are doing Mexican children a
disservice by taking them away from their home country. Where Sayles's movie
depicts a myriad of important perspectives on the complex issue of foreign
adoption, the featurette tramples all over this thoughtful, balanced approach.
We see interview after interview decrying the imperialist attitude of Americans
adopting foreign children and the alienation from their own culture the children
will endure. While this is certainly an issue that needs to be considered, the
featurette's ham-fisted harangue is a far cry from the subtlety of the film. The
documentary becomes hard to take in its single-minded insistence that foreign
adoption is an abomination, when Sayles has shown us street children who, had
they been adopted by Americans, would have been far better off. When the poverty
level is such that the streets are full of homeless children who steal or wash
windshields to earn a few coins and who sniff paint to make their existence
endurable, concerns about a child's being raised in ignorance of his heritage
seem like a false luxury.

I realize that it's easy for me to be pragmatic as a member of the
purportedly imperialist country, but it also seems significant that only Anglos
and Mexican men—not Mexican women—maintained this perspective on
camera. The Mexican women characters in the film who find themselves pregnant
with a child they can't raise seem to understand, albeit reluctantly, that
giving up their child may be the way to give him or her a much better life. I
also find it exasperating that the documentary doesn't seem to admit that
there's an inherent paradox in drawing our attention to the poverty and
wretchedness of a country while criticizing those who want to remove children
from that atmosphere. Indeed, the character in the film who most resents
American adoptive mothers as imperialist in their attitudes, Señora
Muñoz's son, is one of the least authoritative characters in the film.
Formerly jailed because of his political activity, now he nominally works for
his mother at the Casa in a job that consists primarily of napping, sneaking
joints in the guest bathrooms, and ineptly tinkering with faulty equipment. His
political convictions largely take the form of threatening to bomb annoying
hotel guests and crabbing about economic conditions over beer with his friends.
This is scarcely a persuasive witness in the debate over foreign adoption, and
no doubt Sayles had good reason for complicating these sentiments by placing
them in the mouth of such a buffoon.

My other reservation concerns the film itself. As grateful as I am for
Sayles's refusal to conform to the convention of tidy, often unrealistic endings
in films, I found myself wanting more of an ending to this one. His characters
involve us emotionally so much that we want to know what happens to them after
the credits start rolling, even if it's only to see our fears confirmed. It's
certainly true that, by leaving such threads unresolved, Sayles guarantees that
we will continue to think about what we have witnessed—not just the
imaginary constructs of character and plot, but the real-life conditions that
went into their making. Nevertheless, like Oliver Twist, I want to go up to
Sayles and hold out my metaphorical bowl for more.

Closing Statement

It may well leave you dissatisfied. But Casa de los Babys, like so
much of this fine writer-director's other work, will definitely give you a movie
experience that makes you think and feel. If you're seeking light entertainment
for a Friday night, keep moving along. If you're up for a challenging,
thought-provoking film, however, you should definitely plan on paying a visit to
the Casa de los Babys.

The Verdict

John Sayles is asked to provide testimony to the court reporter on the future
lives of his characters. All charges are dismissed.